Home

For the lazy:

• Nextcloud
• Jellyfin
• Immich
• Vaultwarden / Bitwarden
• Uptime Kuma
• AdGuard Home
• Homepage
• Monica
• changedetection.io

Seems a decent selection.

does this count as a spoiler?

Recently discovered changedetection.io. It nicely filled the need I had. I have it watching a few static forum posts for updates that are communicated that way.

I would add searxng - a bit finnicky to set up but very powerful and customizeable.

I’m a little confused. It’s this a self hosted program? Following the link I see a monthly subscription cost.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #145 for this comm, first seen 8th Mar 2026, 00:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

If you don’t want to self host, they offer hosting.

I could never get it working right due to captchas on sites, its a beat idea though

This feels 1000% like a chatgpt prompt copy and pasted into a webpage.

Got it.

That seems pretty cool.

This bot is annoying.

That’s because it is.

You should be able to block it.

I’m going against the new-age tech grain with this, but… I fucking despise docker anything. I can follow directions fine, it’s the troubleshooting that takes too much time. Sure, I’ll learn it eventually, but I do IT for a living I’m not coming home to waste my nights also doing this.

I’ve setup ZimaOS as a massive NAS with Yunohost on anything web-hosted/accessible. A. It’s easier with a graphical UI on stuff that’s packaged. B. Installing, updating, and most other steroids are pretty well automated/packaged to work really well. C. When i have the conversations with friends who aren’t tech savvy and are overwhelmed, I want to have firsthand knowledge of easy systems that’re basic, but powerful, and will help them dip their toes in freedom.

No Proxmox, no docker stuff, no nested VMs, no more complex setups. While I can learn to troubleshoot and memorize CLI, I’m too old and busy with family and work/commute to deal with problems at home lol. Too much tinkering has poised my wife off to the point she thinks all the self hosted stuff is unreliable. So, I deploy, test, vet basic issues, and if it’s too much time or setup involved, or dependencies on other apps, I’m out!!

Too many containers, too many fragile, partial service apps that just feel incomplete. Yuno and Zima (formerly casa) are great!! Others being tested too for fun but at snails pace lol.

Searxng is my most used self hosted service. It’s amazing

and it is great 👌🏻

If what you have to say isn’t important enough to write then it definitely isn’t important enough to read.

You sir, need an AI agent to maintain your self-hosting addiction and free you from the shackles of homelab responsibility. Automate the automations that maintain the automations. That’s the real endgame. /s

Can confirm, solid list for everyone. Only uptime kuma was replaced by beszel in my setup.

Let Chatgpt read it for you

Hah, nice! Yeah maybe my self-hosted AI agent will “take my job” from me at home! Boom, genius

AI generation aside, not a bad list. I’d add searxng, and, opnsense/pfsense is really awesome to have with pfblocker, and then wireguard so you get all the benefits on the go.

I don’t want to argue if AI is good or bad.

I am using social media to read stuff from other human beings. I am not dumb and I can prompt LLMs myself if I have the need to.

I feel you. Seems nobody want’s to understand what they’re running anymore, only throw more software at it, to patch over the issues (which also creates more issues).
Then again, the people who *do want to understand their systems, are not the type to write a blog post about it.

I tried to setup some kinda self hosted AI image generation last month. I didn’t know wtf I was doing and accomplished nothing. Need to give it another try.

@GaMEChld @selfhosted I kinda got this running and I’m here to tell you - unless you’re willing to babysit it through the constant changes and updates and dependency hell that creates, you might be better off just paying for api use at something like https://fal.ai

I don’t disagree with you, but for a single server hosting multiple projects with differing system dependencies, docker is amazing. I’ve come around to using it for this practical reason.

Using docker over direct installation always feels like an unnecessary interface layer that just complicates things and introduces points of failure.

Docker makes sense for several applications, but there’s no intuition unless you’re good at memorizing commands/command lines. I can’t just open up an installer or fumble through it decently well enough to get up and running.

While a UI does add overhead, done well it’s not bad. But also, different people learn different styles, and for the extra bit of resources, I’m willing to sacrifice a few MB ram or CPU utilization for less tinker time. However, 20 years ago I didn’t mind spending that time learning stuff like that because I had a lot more time and way less commitments!

https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

Monica

I hate products with generic names. It makes it utterly impossible to search for.

Even if this OP post might explain it, it is still useless when taken out of context like in the esteemed comment above this one.

/rant, sorry, thank you.

I’m gonna start a company that creates cheap life saving products called “Chris”

Why this matters –

And the essential companion product, Potato.

Just saw this reply. I have to say that I find tools like Claude code indispensable in helping me through my workflow. I have used them enough to the point I know where I’m getting “divorced” from my thought process.

Once that happens, I feel like it no longer belongs to me. It’s someone else’s understanding of what I understood.

And that is my problem with AI generated anything. I am looking at a second-hand take of a second-hand ideation.

I like the idea of SearXNG, but I don’t see why so many people like it for self hosting. You’re still querying search engines with your IP which in many self hosted cases is the same IP as the one you browse the internet with. I think SearXNG is really good if you setup a service on a server IP (like a VPS) and it gets used by multiple people, or if you tunnel it trough a VPN, but then again you could also just VPN your search engine searches.

So why do you like it? Is it for the aggregation of multiple engines? Or maybe the fact that it doesn’t link your specific browser to a search? I really wonder and am not hating.

I had that same feeling until I actually learned it.

There’s close to no performance loss, it’s better for security, it makes it extremely easy for developers to ship something that just works, it allows easy updating, and much more.

I prefer docker over almost anything now, and it has made my life much easier.

Why?

Its a CRM, i agree with the gripes about the name but tbf I’m kinda surprised to see it on here? The GitHub repo seems pretty dead

I also love when I buy something off of Etsy believe it to be hand made, and it ends up being a dropshipped piece of garbage.

I just learned about Uptime Kuma from this post and spent an hour spinning it up in a container, building my status page, and setting up monitoring for my services and game servers. It’s working great so far for me. What do you prefer about Beszel? I’m looking into it now and it looks great too

On a slightly related note, if you ever want a blast of the past, check out the ASCII art section of chris.com

Yeah, this is true. I just like to tinker. I already pay for one AI tool for like actual use as a tool in my life. The self hosted image thing attempt was like, hey my next home lab project, let’s see how easy it is to just get an image generated from scratch with nothing currently setup! The answer I found was, “you still need more training grasshopper. Much to learn. “

same, i pipe it through gluetun with my Linux isos. works great. maybe second only to jellyfin in most used

Uptime is really good for simple uptime, no worries it gets the job done. Bezsel does more metrics, like a Prometheus+Graphana combination but simpler to set up.

Organic design experience can be uncovered by going to the main page. https://slicker.me/

It feels more real than OP’s article. ;)

Oh wow.. My 10 year old python script may be replaced now

Yea, no links to any of the tools.

Opencloud instead of nextcloud

my SD card in my ras pi got corrupted recently. Thankfully I had my docker directory backed up. I pulled the docker directory, docker compose up -d and within about 20 minutes (not including downloading time) I was back up and running. Docker is a godsend.

Sadly SearXNG is plagued by captcha limit. Nothing I tried reliable works.

I mean you’re memorizing a GUI as well. I don’t work in this field at all but docker compose files are pretty straightforward even for me. Took like 15 minutes to figure out and now it’s much quicker to get set up then any other option.

Not even running your own? Once you get past the Docker config you can have your own endpoint. Mine has never had any issues

Not sure how your docker directory and services look like but the important thing is that you use remote volumes (or backed up ones) and that you backup your compose file of course. But besides that it’s indeed that easy.

Oh shit that edit is hilarious and you don’t even see the irony in it.

The Invention of “Jaywalking”

This is the story of how, in the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America — by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. So the death toll was astounding. In cities of more than 25,000 people, cars were a leading cause of death by 1925. In the 1920s alone, car drivers killed over 200,000 Americans.

over 100 years later and some communities are still fighting for policies that allow an environment that fosters connection and value of life over powerful industry lobbyists trying to take over with their products (sound familiar?). But for sure, it will just fix itself if we just give it a little more time 😘

You’re still querying search engines with your IP

IP in itself might not be as much of a problem, unless you have a static IP, which most consumers don’t. And even if you do, you are also hiding a lot of baggage relating to user agents or other fingerprintable settings. IP alone is rarely used as a sole point to link your traffic to other datapoints. On top of that, you can still just decide to exclude google, bing etc from your search results and rely more “open” ones like DDG or ecosia.

Another huge upside of searxng is the aggregation of results. The search results of google are all up to, well, google. Same with bing, which is controlled by microsoft. If these companies now decide to “surpress” certain information, people using only those engines directly would no longer see those news. However, if you get your results from multiple search engines, you are not - or lets say less - affected by that kind of nonsense.

As always with news and information, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. And that’s where searxng helps out tremendously.

You can go semi-advanced mode by using regex to ignore certain line changes. Some sites require you to go super-advanced mode by using playwright running in a headless-v2 container rather than just plain text mode.

It’s nice being able to see the history of changes. Especially when there’s multiple rapidfire changes.

Same here, but I’ve began to wonder if using the same connection/ip could be used to help with fingerprinting

Or, just radicale and syncthing (if you don’t need a webUI)

I use owncloud

Syncthing isn’t quite the same

I’d be more likely to use a SMB share

True… could be both… or perhaps copyparty.

I was thinking more along the colab side, where syncthing is working on your laptop and mine to sync our files, rather than central storage, but fair point.

LOL. Back in the day I saw a band open for somebody and the band name was ‘Bob.’ Even in the early aughts searching for ‘Bob’ was a pointless activity. They eventually changed the name to Super Bob which is just as stupid but at least searchable.

I run the following: - Beszel - Gerbera - Immich - Joplin - Pihole - Portainer - Radicale - Rtorrent

Happy to received critique/feedback/advice on this list :P

If I’m only looking for document storage and maybe a caldav (Android caldav options are rough) what would be best?

I have a working radicale lxc currently powered off because the integration is almost 100% app dependant on a Googlefied device. I can apparent just add a caldav easy as that in graphene but my wife’s aosp device ala Google fi needs an app and they ask y seem to suck.

Oh yea, I’m still going to try it out the next time I need to page watch.

I still don’t truly know how to use docker, as I use dockSTARTer on my Debian VM on Proxmox, but it runns all my services now. I tried to resist and have multiple LXCs run everything, but as my homelab grew more complex (SMB & NFS, VPN tunnels, filesharing/hardlinks, etc.) I’ve just given up and have most things running on the docker. With dockstarter it’s enter “yes” to some terminal qs, copypaste templates into your overrides folder, and then use ds -u for update and ds -c to run everything.

I tried to use podman at first because people said it was safer and faster but… I literally couldn’t figure out how to turn a pod into a service so it will autostart on system launch 😅

Radicale just implements CalDAV and CardDAV so use any clients you want.

I’m mostly using the Fossify from F-Droid - their calendar, contacts, all work with DAVx5 syncing to radicale and it works fine… no 3rd party tracking my dentist appointments.

I also have TrackerControl running on my phone, so I know that there’s no tracking.

What if you used ansible to automate it? One bit of trouble I have is forgetting stuff I did. If Yaml files store info, that seems easier. I even thought to created a script that logs all the events. I’ve never used it though.

I do run it in docker. It used to work great until few months ago. Maybe my provider (Hetzner) ip triggers captcha. Tried tor proxy and it didn’t make much difference. Brave, Startpage, DDG - all periodically throw captcha / too many request errors.

Yeah might be the IP range of the provide. Also sometimes it stops working till you update. But I expect the hetzner IP range has more than one self hosted instance on it so probably gets tagged for the whole range.